A Christmas gift that is no surprise

At age 31, I would like to believe my interaction with Christmas has evolved a bit over the years. Yet, if I am honest with myself, little has changed from one December to the next.

My mother delights in reminiscing about how I was, to paraphrase her words, “the most excited child at Christmas” she had ever been around. I still experience a great deal of enthusiasm and enjoyment at the start of the holiday season — I just temper it with a dose of adult appropriateness, trying to keep my exclamations to a minimum and only breaking into random song when part of an organized caroling expedition.

My Christmas list has been amended somewhat over the years. Nintendo baseball games used to crown my register of “wants” and “needs.” Since my teenage years, my wishlist has been mired in a perpetual state of arrested development as I desire little more than an assortment of music, literature and film, despite the good-natured protestations of relatives who would like to give me something more “functional.”

One facet that certainly hasn’t changed much over time is the specific artistic articles I consume this time of year — while my seasonal soundtrack has expanded to accommodate wonderful offerings by Sufjan Stevens and She & Him, Dean Martin and Darlene Love really always have been my Christmas music baseline. The same films that flashed across the Danielsen family TV screen as a kid — “Home Alone,” “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” — make an annual appearance at my home today.

But over the span of several recent Christmases, I can say my engagement with art and gift-giving and -receiving has taken a slightly different shape. The most prominent example is one that my 6- or 16-year-old self would not have abided. I know exactly what I’m getting today as a Christmas gift from my wife — and she knows what to expect from me. We each knew what our gifts would be Dec. 26 of last year, in fact. For the past four Christmases, we’ve gifted one another True/False Film Fest passes, purchased as soon as they go on sale a month or two before the holidays to ensure a place in the increasingly packed moviehouses — fixed and temporary — that exist in Columbia each spring.

Some might find our lack of craftiness or mystery stale, perhaps unromantic. If a gift lacks the all-important element of surprise, is it really all that much fun or all that worth giving? Yet I am always delighted and never disappointed with this purposeful present because I know the surprises will come later — as I am captivated by a film I least expected, as a documentary wrings emotions from me I barely knew I had the capacity to exercise, as my wife and I understand each other in a different way as the result of a post-film discussion.

People, often cheekily, speak of certain gifts that keep on giving all year round — true to form, I’m presently remembering Randy Quaid making the most of Chevy Chase’s disappointing jelly-of-the-month bonus in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” Yet, like very few things, art fits the bill. If the light or mood strikes just right, you can find new grace, new color, new resonance in a painting that has resided at the same point of longitude and latitude on your wall for years, decades even. To this day, I regularly find fresh layers of meaning or discover notes and chords I never knew existed in my favorite records by Thelonious Monk or Radiohead. Only the most intangible of gifts, terms that become buzzwords this time of year — friendship, love, peace, joy — can offer more in the way of true, regular and refreshing revelation.

So, this Christmas, my wish for you is that you might find a painting gift-wrapped under the tree, a new favorite album in your stocking or, at the very least, will be heading to a movie theater to see an engaging piece of cinema after today’s revelry dies down. Maybe you will be surprised by the gift today; maybe you won’t. But I can promise you will be surprised by that same present and new experiences of it for many more Christmases to come.